Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet Paul Muldoon to Read at Queens College on December 7

-- Irish Studies Program is Sponsoring Free Event--

FLUSHING, N.Y., November 23, 2010—Internationally renowned poet Paul Muldoon—author of 32 collections, including this year’s acclaimed release, Maggot—will read from his work on Tuesday, December 7, at 5 pm at Queens College, Rosenthal Library, Room 230. The event is free and open to the public. Following his reading, he will entertain questions from the audience.

Born and raised in Northern Ireland, Muldoon was educated at Queens University Belfast, where he studied with Seamus Heaney and published his first book of poems, New Weather (1973). He stayed in Belfast until 1986, working in BBC radio and television. Although he moved to the United States the next year, he continued to draw inspiration from the other side of the Atlantic. He has cited fellow Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice and the Welsh Dylan Thomas as influences for his witty and verbally playful poetry, which taps into the wellsprings of language and takes delight in it.

Muldoon’s collections include Mules (1977), which Heaney called “one of the very best,” and Meeting the British (1987), which evokes history and politics through fantasy. In 1992, Muldoon won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Poetry for Madoc: A Mystery (1990); after publication of The Annals of Chile (1994), he received that year’s T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Muldoon was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2003 for Moy Sand and Gravel. Since 2007, he has been poetry editor of the New Yorker.

Muldoon has taught at Columbia University; the University of California, Berkeley; and at Oxford University, where he was Professor of Poetry. He is currently Howard G.B. Clark Professor of the Humanities and chair of the University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University. Muldoon lives near Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife, writer Jean Hanff Korelitz, and their two children.

This reading is sponsored by the Department of Irish Studies, directed by Clare Carroll (Professor, Comparative Literature). The oldest Irish Studies program in the New York area, the department offers courses in Irish archaeology, history, language, and literature. The faculty includes Jeffrey Cassvan (English), Sarah Covington and Patrick McGough (History), and James Moore (Anthropology). For more information, see www.qcpages.qc.edu/irishstudies/ or contact Clare Carroll at clare.carroll@qc.cuny.edu.

From November 4 through December 23, 2010, the Irish Studies Department and the Queens College Art Center are co-sponsoring an exhibit, “Voices Envisioned: Memories Made in Northern Ireland.” To learn more about the show, see http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/Art_Library/exhibitions.html.